Author Archives: John F. Lindner

1930s businessman Edgar Kaufmann Sr. and his family lived in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. Kaufmann owned a rural retreat outside the city and wanted a weekend home there. He assumed his 67-year-old architect would design the home with a good view of … Continue reading →
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The tallest structure in the world since 2008, Burj Khalifa (or Khalifa Tower) is the fantasy skyscraper of my childhood. Designed and engineered by Adrian Smith and Bill Baker of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), it is an architectural and … Continue reading →
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Chaotic systems are extremely sensitive to the initial conditions and parameters that define them. Minute perturbations of the parameters can even convert chaotic motion to periodic motion. This alliance between control methods and physics — cybernetical physics — opens the … Continue reading →
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Momentum conservation (or Newton’s third law) ensures two-way or bidirectional coupling for typical media like guitar strings and spring mattresses. One-way or unidirectional coupling enables the propagation of solitary waves or solitons with diverse behaviors in otherwise dissipative media, but … Continue reading →
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Wind is free and ubiquitous and can be harnessed in multiple ways. We recently published an article in the Physical Review demonstrating mechanical stochastic resonance in a tabletop experiment that harvests wind energy to amplify weak periodic signals detected via the movement … Continue reading →
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Why has SpaceX chosen methane to fuel its Raptor rocket engine? Robert Goddard’s first rockets used liquid oxygen O2 or LOX and gasoline. The Saturn V moon rocket first stage used LOX and refined kerosene. The Saturn V second stage used … Continue reading →
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In 1971 during Apollo 15’s return from Earth’s moon, astronaut Al Worden performed the first deep space walk nearly 200 000 miles from Earth to recover external service module film canisters that had mapped the lunar surface. Worden was able … Continue reading →
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I recently ascended to Czar of Physics. (Oops — I mistyped Chair and it autocompleted to Czar.) It’s not my first year as Czar, but this time, during the handover from the previous Czar, I inherited a small cardboard box. Inside I found … Continue reading →
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When Steve Jobs phoned Pritzker Prize architect Norman Foster in 2009 for help designing Apple’s  new Cupertino California campus, he said “Don’t think of me as your client; think of me as one of your team”. The design that evolved … Continue reading →
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Wires suspended above our streets are a late 19th century technology stubbornly persisting into the 21st century. They can hum in a breeze. A wire disturbs the air flow shedding eddies alternately up and down, sometimes fast enough to be heard as a … Continue reading →
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